GRA wrote:...this thread has long since become the de facto thread for general discussion of autonomous cars, rather than one limited to the topic title.

I changed the title, which made deciding where to post the story below easier...

The article below shows how rapidly AV's have advanced since the original post ~ four years ago:

Less stressful than a taxi: We ride in Hyundai's Autonomous Ioniq Electric

The day after California told Uber to halt the testing of its driverless cars, Hyundai gave us a brief ride in an autonomous Ioniq Electric. The trip was mostly uneventful — our driver/engineer didn't hit anyone, and, unlike Uber's, Hyundai's car didn't run any red lights. You may think that's faint praise, but at the speed of advancement we take nothing for granted. More than once during our ride around a pre-mapped, all-right-turn route in Las Vegas, the Ioniq had to sort things out for itself, and the longer you ride the more you realize the scope of data we humans process without noticing.

This Ioniq was identified only by its Korea-spec origins — dual charging ports for fast and regular recharge and no side marker lights — and Nevada's autonomous vehicle license plate. Tourists were completely unaware that it was driving itself.

The autonomous Ioniq uses one 140-degree and two 110-degree Ibeo LiDAR units in the front fascia, plus a camera array inside the cabin at the top of the windshield. A single camera is used for traffic-light detection, with stereo units for the driving assistants. According to Hyundai, the autonomous gear detects objects knee-high but also will not drive into a low-hanging tree branch. We're also told the system works in rain and snow, citing the all-conditions approval certificate from Nevada, though that center front sensor looks prime for snow packing in heavy stuff...

During our ride, the car signaled appropriately, always used the correct lane, and stayed within the lines even on poorly marked curving roads (no lane changes on this route) and dutifully motored past Las Vegas's finest at the posted speed limit...

A good perspective on Nissan's plan to use remote drivers to accelerate the transition to vehicles which require no (on-board) drivers:

Nissan’s Path to Self-Driving Cars? Humans in Call Centers

“THIS IS IT!” Maarten Sierhuis says. “I mean, look at this.” He points to a photo of road construction at an intersection in Sunnyvale, California, near Nissan’s Silicon Valley research center, which Sierhuis runs. A line of cones shunts traffic to the left side of the double yellow line. The light is red. A worker holds a “Slow” sign. It’s the sort of seemingly unremarkable situation that can trigger convulsions in the brain of an autonomous vehicle.

“There is so much cognition that you need here,” Sierhuis says. The driver—or the car—has to interpret the placement of the cones and the behavior of the human worker to understand that in this case, it’s OK to drive through a red light on the wrong side of the road. “This is not gonna happen in the next five to ten years.”

It’s a stunning admission, in its way: Nissan’s R&D chief believes the truly driverless car—something many carmakers and tech giants have promised to deliver within five years or fewer—is an unreachable short-term goal. Reality: one; robots: zero. Even a system that could handle 99 percent of driving situations will cause trouble for the company trying to promote, and make money off, the technology. “We will always need the human in the loop,” Sierhuis says.

But Nissan has a solution: a call center with human meatbags ready to take command via remote control...

On January 5, 2017 during his CES keynote Nissan chairman of the board and chief executive officer Carlos Ghosn announced several advancements as part of the Nissan Intelligent Mobility blueprint for transforming how cars are driven, powered and integrated into wider society. Highlights included:

The launch of Nissan' breakthrough Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) system. Developed from NASA technology, SAM partners in-vehicle artificial intelligence (AI) with human support to help autonomous vehicles make decisions in unpredictable situations and build the knowledge of in-vehicle AI. This technology will enable millions of driverless cars to co-exist with human drivers in an accelerated timeline. It is part of Nissan Intelligent Integration...

A new Nissan LEAF will be coming in the near future. The model will be equipped with ProPILOT technology, enabling autonomous drive functionality for single-lane highway driving. This new LEAF will build on the company's leadership in electric vehicles, which includes more than 250,000 Nissan LEAFs sold worldwide since 2010. The new LEAF represents the next chapter of Nissan Intelligent Power......

1) That each autonomous vehicle would have the uplink data rate to provide enough data to a remote operator. If I am not mistaken, this is one of the real limitations the military has with operating a large squadron of remotely-controlled drones.2) That a human operator would be able to achieve enough situational awareness quickly enough in a situation in which the robot got confused to be able to safely move things forward. In many cases, I suspect there would already have been an accident before the human could get himself/herself oriented.3) That this will prove to be somehow better than just using fully-autonomous software at any stage of development.

What's odd, IMO, is designing a semi-autonomous system such as Tesla's that still requires meatbags to be on-board every car, and ready to intervene at a moment's notice whenever the autopilot fails, defeating the primary benefit provided by a "self-driving" or "driver-free" vehicle.

The state Department of Motor Vehicles allows testing of autonomous vehicles, but requires a driver behind the wheel. Tech companies and automakers have criticized the rules for slowing innovation.

The new proposal would allow manufacturers to test cars without drivers, as long as remote operators monitor the vehicles.

The proposal would push California ahead of other states and could pave the way for a new world of design and innovation in transportation. It would also boost Silicon Valley’s market position, as tech companies — ranging from Google’s Waymo, Tesla and Uber to a number of highly valued startups — seek to crack the engineering challenges of fully autonomous driving.

“This is the next step in eventually allowing driverless autonomous vehicles on California roadways,” DMV Director Jean Shiomoto said in a statement. The changes in the testing restrictions could come as early as this year...